Shimon Peres Dies: Israel's Tireless Peace Advocate

Peres served in every major role in Israeli government across seven decades: defense minister, finance minister, foreign minister, prime minister twice, president. He was 70 when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for the Oslo Accords he'd helped negotiate. He was 93 when he died, still arguing for a two-state solution that the parties on both sides had effectively abandoned. His critics said he was naive. His defenders said he understood something about the alternative. He'd built Israel's nuclear weapons program in the 1950s and then spent the next sixty years trying to make weapons unnecessary. Both were sincere. Born Szymon Perski in Wiszniew, Poland in 1923, Peres emigrated to Palestine at age 11 with his family. His relatives who stayed behind were murdered in the Holocaust. He joined David Ben-Gurion's inner circle as a young man and was tasked with secretly developing Israel's nuclear capability at the Dimona reactor in the Negev desert, working with France to acquire the technology. The program gave Israel an undeclared nuclear arsenal that remains the foundation of its strategic deterrence. His turn toward peace came gradually. The Oslo Accords of 1993, which he negotiated secretly with PLO representatives in Norway, were meant to create a framework for Palestinian self-governance leading to statehood. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. Rabin's assassination in 1995 by a Jewish extremist devastated Peres and the peace process alike. He lost the subsequent election to Benjamin Netanyahu by less than one percent. As president from 2007 to 2014, a largely ceremonial role, he continued advocating for peace while the political ground shifted decisively against it.